One of the men, Boyce, picked the service-door lock. They went inside to the elevator and took it up to the sixteenth floor. Three of them exited, one of them, Boyce, going up one more floor. He would set up to make an entrance onto Bilal Mohamad’s balcony from the balcony of the apartment on the floor above. The other two, Saunders and Chandler, would wait and monitor Carrie from the hallway stairwell, ready to break in to Bilal’s apartment at a moment’s notice. Her emergency code was anything to do with flowers. The instant she mentioned it, they would come running.
At a signal from Saunders, Carrie went to Mohamad’s apartment door-there were only two apartments on the entire floor-and, taking out her Beretta, knocked.
There was no answer. She knocked again, harder. And again. Nothing. All this and nobody home, she thought, annoyed. She put her ear to the door and listened but heard nothing. Then the faint whirr of something electric, like a razor. Looking back at the doorway to the stairwell, which was cracked slightly open, she couldn’t see Saunders or Chandler, but she was glad they were there. She took a deep breath and, taking out her lock pick, began working on the lock, trying to remember her training at the Farm.
There was a click; she turned the handle and opened the door, the Beretta ready. She stepped into a large, luxurious main room, brightly lit and with a panoramic glass view of the marina and the sea. The whirring electric sound was louder. It sounded like it was coming from the bedroom. Leaving the apartment door open a crack for Saunders and Chandler, she moved in a shooting stance toward the bedroom. Pushing the bedroom door open with her toe, she stepped in and stopped at the bizarre sight of a boyish-looking man, muscular, presumably Bilal Mohamad, his hair bleached pure blond-white and his body draped in a black plastic garbage bag with his head sticking out, with a gun with a silencer aimed directly at her.
They stood there, frozen. Neither moved a muscle. The oddest thought occurred to Carrie: he was like a male Marilyn Monroe, sexy and lost. And then it struck her that the whirring sound had stopped.
“Ya Allah, this is awkward,” Bilal said finally in Arabic. “Should we kill each other or see if there’s a way for us both to survive?”
“Put your gun down and, inshallah, we’ll talk,” Carrie replied in Arabic.
“Okay, but if you kill me I’m going to kick myself in hell for trusting a CIA agent. You are CIA, aren’t you? Idiotic question. Of course you are,” he said in English. “American, female, gun. Some idiot’s finally figured out that Davis Fielding didn’t kill himself. Was it you? Of course it was. They don’t take women as seriously as they should, do they?” he said, tossing his gun onto the bed. Now that she was able to pay attention, she noticed that his hands were covered with blood. He caught her looking at his hands. “You came at a bad moment. Another half hour and I’d have been gone,” he added.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“See for yourself,” he said, gesturing at the bathroom. “I hope you don’t have a weak stomach.”
“Don’t move. Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said, edging toward the bathroom door.
“Of course. You’re already nervous. Why wouldn’t you be? I don’t want you to shoot me by accident.”
She risked a quick glance at the bathroom. There was a man’s naked body in the bathtub. Its head and hands had been cut off, the head sitting neatly atop the hands at the foot of the tub. The whirring sound she had heard was an electric carving knife, still plugged in to the bathroom shaving outlet. Feeling nauseous, she sensed motion behind her and whirled back, ready to fire. Bilal had moved slightly, but only to wipe his bloodstained hands on the bedspread.
“Don’t move!” she snapped. “Who was he?”
“Daleel Ismail. He always fancied me. You understand. You’re an attractive woman. People like us, we can’t help it if men fancy us. Poor Daleel. He thought he was finally going to do me. That’s the thing about life. You can never be sure if you’re going to be the one doing the screwing or getting screwed,” he said.
“Why’d you kill him?” she asked.
“Can’t you guess? Listen, can I take this plastic off?” He tugged at the garbage bag he was wearing. “It’s hot and the idea of dying while wearing this is disgusting. Unless you’ll let me continue what I was doing? No?” he said, looking at her. “Well, I’m taking it off then.”
He pulled the plastic covering over his head and tossed it onto the bed.
“We don’t have to stand here. Shall we have a drink and talk about it like the civilized murderers we are?” he said, walking to the bedroom door and into the main room. “I know you don’t trust me. You can watch as I wash my hands. The human body really is a messy thing, isn’t it? Amazing that we manage to idealize and sexually fantasize about it as much as we do.”
She followed him to the bar, where she held the Beretta on him while he washed his hands in the bar’s sink. He dried his hands on a towel.
“What are you drinking?” he asked.
“Tequila if you’ve got it. If not, Scotch,” she said.
“Scotch. Highland Park,” he said, checking the bottles behind the bar. He poured them both glasses and gestured for her to join him on twin ultramodern armchairs in the main room.
“What are we drinking to?” she asked.
“To us both still being alive-for the moment,” he said, and drank. She did too.
“This Daleel whatever-his-name-is, why’d you kill him?”
“He looked like me. Same size, height, musculature. People sometimes mistook him for me. I don’t know why he couldn’t understand my not wanting to do him. It would have been too much like masturbation.”
Suddenly, she understood.
“You were faking your own death. That’s why the head and hands. To make it hard to identify the body. They would assume it was you. What were you going to do with the head and hands? Dump them in the Mediterranean?”
“You see, you are a clever girl. All right if I smoke?” he said, reaching for a cigarette in an ivory-inlaid box on the glass coffee table. “I know what ridiculous Puritans you Americans are about these things. It’s okay to be a murderer, but one mustn’t smoke.” He lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and exhaled.
“What about DNA? They’d find out it wasn’t you.”
“Seriously?” He looked at her as if she’d suggested that a caveman program a computer. “This is the Levant, not Manhattan. There’s no database, no science. The purpose of police work here is to destroy your political enemies, not solve crime.”
“Where were you going?” she asked.
“Actually, it was a ridiculous choice. Death or living in New Zealand. Those two are virtually indistinguishable.”
“Who were you running from? Us?”
“There really is no limit to American arrogance, is there? Why be afraid of you? Become infamous with Americans and the worst that can happen is you get your own reality TV show. Can’t you figure it out? You don’t look stupid; still, people can fool you.” He exhaled a stream of smoke at her.
“What about Davis Fielding? You were lovers?”
“He called me. Can you imagine? All those years, using Rana to pretend he was straight, and him thinking he was running her, when in fact, between Rana and I, we milked him for every piece of intelligence in the Middle East. He called to say good-bye, the sentimental idiot. He was as bad a spy as he was a lover.”
Looking at him, with his oddly boyish face and white-blond hair, she suddenly understood.
“Abu Nazir. That’s why you killed Fielding. He’s shutting things down. That’s why you’re running,” she said.
“So,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke at her. “Not entirely stupid. So what’s it to be-Carrie, isn’t it?” He smiled nastily, sending a bolt of fear through her at the thought that he knew her real identity. She was seeing the real man. Worse, whatever he was going to do, he had made his mind up. She needed to get her people in here now. “You see, I did get everything out of Fielding. So, Carrie, are you going to let me get back to what I was doing and let me disappear? Or are you going to do something ridiculous, like putting me in a cell with those imbecile jihadis at Guantánamo Bay?”